| | 43 | Author: | Stewart, Calvin | Add | | | Title: | Uncle Josh Weathersby's "Punkin Centre Stories"  | | | | Published: | 1997 | | | | Subjects: | University of Virginia Library, Text collection | UVA-LIB-Text | | | | Description: | THE author was born in Virginia, on a little patch of land, so poor we had to
fertilize it to make brick. Our family, while having cast their fortunes with
the South, was not a family ruined by the war; we did not have anything when the
war commenced, and so we held our own. I secured a common school education, and
at the age of twelve I left home, or rather home left me—things just
petered out. I was slush cook on an Ohio River Packet; check clerk in a stave
and heading camp in the knobs of Tennessee, Virginia and Georgia; I helped lay
the track of the M. K. & T. R. R., and was chambermaid in a livery
stable. Made my first appearance on the stage at the National Theatre in
Cincinnati, Ohio, and have since then chopped cord wood, worked in a coal mine,
made cross ties (and walked them), worked on a farm, taught a district school
(made love to the big girls), run a threshing machine, cut bands,
fed the machine and ran the engine. Have been a freight and passenger brakeman,
fired and ran a locomotive; also a freight train conductor and check clerk in a
freight house; worked on the section; have been a shot gun messenger for the
Wells, Fargo Company. Have been with a circus, minstrels, farce comedy,
burlesque and dramatic productions; have been with good shows, bad shows,
medicine shows, and worse, and some shows where we had landlords singing in the
chorus. Have played variety houses and vaudeville houses; have slept in a box
car one night, and a swell hotel the next; have been a traveling salesman (could
spin as many yarns as any of them). For the past four years have made the Uncle
Josh stories for the talking machine. The Lord only knows what next! | | | Similar Items: | Find |
| 44 | Author: | Tarkington, Booth, 1869-1946 | Add | | | Title: | The Conquest of Canaan | | | | Published: | 1995 | | | | Subjects: | University of Virginia Library, Text collection | UVA-LIB-Text | | | | Description: | A DRY snow had fallen steadily throughout the still night, so that when a cold, upper wind
cleared the sky gloriously in the morning the incongruous Indiana town shone in a white
harmony—roof, ledge, and earth as evenly covered as by moonlight. There was no thaw;
only where the line of factories followed the big bend of the frozen river, their distant
chimneys like exclamation points on a blank page, was there a first threat against the supreme
whiteness. The wind passed quickly and on high; the shouting of the school-children had ceased
at nine o'clock with pitiful suddenness; no sleigh-bells laughed out on the air; and the
muffling of the thoroughfares wrought an unaccustomed peace like that of Sunday.
This was the phenomenon which afforded the opening of the morning debate of the sages in the
wide windows of the "National House.'' | | | Similar Items: | Find |
| 45 | Author: | Tarkington, Booth, 1869-1946 | Add | | | Title: | The Flirt | | | | Published: | 1994 | | | | Subjects: | University of Virginia Library, Text collection | UVA-LIB-Text | | | | Description: | Valentine Corliss walked up Corliss Street the hottest afternoon
of that hot August, a year ago, wearing a suit of white serge
which attracted a little attention from those observers who were
able to observe anything except the heat. The coat was shaped
delicately; it outlined the wearer, and, fitting him as women's
clothes fit women, suggested an effeminacy not an attribute of
the tall Corliss. The effeminacy belonged all to the tailor, an
artist plying far from Corliss Street, for the coat would have
encountered a hundred of its fellows at Trouville or Ostende this
very day. Corliss Street is the Avenue du Bois de Boulogne, the
Park Lane, the Fifth Avenue, of Capitol City, that smoky
illuminant of our great central levels, but although it esteems
itself an established cosmopolitan thoroughfare, it is still
provincial enough to be watchful; and even in its torrid languor
took some note of the alien garment. | | | Similar Items: | Find |
| 50 | Author: | Twain, Mark, 1835-1910 | Add | | | Title: | The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County | | | | Published: | 1997 | | | | Subjects: | University of Virginia Library, Text collection | UVA-LIB-Text | | | | Description: | I found Simon Wheeler dozing comfortably by the bar-room stove of
the old, dilapidated tavern in the ancient mining camp of Boomerang,
and I noticed that he was fat and bald-headed, and had an expression
of winning gentleness and simplicity upon his tranquil countenance.
He roused up and gave me good-day. I told him a friend of mine had
commissioned me to make some inquiries about a cherished companion
of his boyhood named Leonidas W. Smiley — Rev. Leonidas W. Smiley
— a young minister of the Gospel, who he had heard was at one time
a resident of this village of Boomerang. I added that if Mr. Wheeler
could tell me any thing about this Rev. Leonidas W. Smiley, I would
feel under many obligations to him. | | | Similar Items: | Find |
| 51 | Author: | Twain, Mark, 1835-1910 | Add | | | Title: | The Mysterious Stranger; A Romance by Mark Twain [pseud.] with
illustrations by N.C. Wyeth. | | | | Published: | 2000 | | | | Subjects: | University of Virginia Library, Text collection | UVA-LIB-Text | | | | Description: | IT WAS IN 1590—winter. Austria was far away from the world, and
asleep; it was still the Middle Ages in Austria, and promised to remain so
forever. Some even set it away back centuries upon centuries and said that by
the mental and spiritual clock it was still the Age of Belief in Austria. But
they meant it as a compliment, not a slur, and it was so taken, and we were all
proud of it. I remember it well, although I was only a boy; and I remember, too,
the pleasure it gave me. | | | Similar Items: | Find |
| 52 | Author: | Twain, Mark, 1835-1910 | Add | | | Title: | Roughing It | | | | Published: | 1998 | | | | Subjects: | University of Virginia Library, Text collection | UVA-LIB-Text | | | | Description: | MY brother had just been appointed Secretary of Nevada
Territory—an office of such majesty that it concentrated in itself
the duties and dignities of Treasurer, Comptroller, Secretary of
State, and Acting Governor in the Governor's absence. A salary of
eighteen hundred dollars a year and the title of "Mr. Secretary,"
gave to the great position an air of wild and imposing grandeur. I
was young and ignorant, and I envied my brother. I coveted his
distinction and his financial splendor, but particularly and
especially the long, strange journey he was going to make, and the
curious new world he was going to explore. He was going to
travel! I never had been away from home, and that word "travel"
had a seductive charm for me. Pretty soon he would be hundreds
and hundreds of miles away on the great plains and deserts, and
among the mountains of the Far West, and would see buffaloes and
Indians, and prairie dogs, and antelopes, and have all kinds of
adventures, and may be get hanged or scalped, and have ever such
a fine time, and write home and tell us all about it, and be a hero.
And he would see the gold mines and the silver mines, and maybe
go about of an afternoon when his work was done, and pick up two
or three pailfuls of shining slugs, and nuggets of gold and silver on
the hillside. And by and by he would become very rich, and return
home by sea, and be able to talk as calmly about San Francisco and
the ocean, and "the isthmus" as if it was nothing of any
consequence to have seen those marvels face to face. What I
suffered in contemplating his happiness, pen cannot describe. And
so, when he offered me, in cold blood, the sublime position of
private secretary under him, it appeared to me that
the heavens and the earth passed away, and the firmament was
rolled together as a scroll! I had nothing more to desire. My
contentment was complete.
At the end of an hour or two I was ready for the journey. Not
much packing up was necessary, because we were going in the
overland stage from the Missouri frontier to Nevada, and
passengers were only allowed a small quantity of baggage apiece.
There was no Pacific railroad in those fine times of ten or twelve
years ago—not a single rail of it. | | | Similar Items: | Find |
| 57 | Author: | Washington, Booker T. | Add | | | Title: | Negro Self-Help | | | | Published: | 1996 | | | | Subjects: | University of Virginia Library, Text collection | UVA-LIB-Text | | | | Description: | FROM time to time in the past a great deal of matter has been
furnished to the public, with the praiseworthy purpose of portraying
the individual struggles and sacrifices of colored youths to secure an
education. These efforts of struggling young men and women, with
no inspiration in family tradition and fortune, and with little or no
money with which to secure the knowledge they crave, is one of the
most encouraging as well as pathetic features I have come across in
my educational work during the past twenty years. As a hopeful
indication of race character, and I may safely so describe it, it must
be of peculiar interest to the average American interested in the
Negro people. | | | Similar Items: | Find |
| 58 | Author: | Washington, Booker T. | Add | | | Title: | Negro Progress in Virginia | | | | Published: | 1997 | | | | Subjects: | University of Virginia Library, Text collection | UVA-LIB-Text | | | | Description: | THE members of the colored race who live outside of Virginia are
beginning to grow somewhat jealous of the progress which our race is
making in this commonwealth. The Negro race in Virginia is going
forward, in my opinion, in all the fundamental and substantial things of
life, faster than the Negro himself realizes and faster than his white
neighbor realizes. I say this notwithstanding there are many existing
weaknesses and much still to be accomplished. This progress which
Virginia Negroes are now experiencing is owing to two causes. | | | Similar Items: | Find |
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